In all contexts, reading is considered to be an important prerequisite for satisfactory participation in productive activity and cultural and social life. Competent use of text and textual orientation are fundamental for planning and executing tasks in modern society. In countries with a highly educated population, such as Norway, the majority of people with a higher education work in private or public services. The study of reading highlights the quality of such services and what conditions are required for the services to function. It is important to study technological, social, aesthetic and political factors through various academic perspectives.
In public debates about reading, the focus is usually on recreational reading, and especially on the reading activities of children and adolescents. Extensive new studies are required in this area, together with a clarification of what the data basis for research in this field may be. However, from a social point of view, occupational reading, the use of text that regulates both attention and execution of work-oriented and more practical processes, may well be as important as recreational reading.
The term Literacy, used as a definition both of the fundamental ability to read and reading as an integrated and reflexive practice in all written and textual culture, should be described using several related sets of definition. It will then span a continuum, which extends from reading related to defined threshold level (functional literacy) via acquisition of cultural factors that support or supplement functional literacy, e.g., knowledge of special language factors, certain text traditions and information units (cultural literacy), to a complex ability to decode ideological dimensions of use of language and text, communicating in occupational and social practices, being integrated in cultural rituals, traditions and institutions and to mastering new multi-modal expressions (critical literacy).
A common platform for this approach is to regard literacy as practices that develop in broad and complex contexts, which draw on both individual and joint history, which have been based on symbol systems that presume mutual mastering and exchange of coded information and representation and which in total have become established as a cultural heritage with a number of value setting values.
In the main, these perspectives will consist of an historical-contextual perspective, an aesthetic – hermeneutic perspective, a didactic perspective and a linguistic perspective. We have defined these perspectives in four core areas in Literacy Studies:
- Reading and writing in society and history
- Reading and interpretation
- Reading and writing development
- Writing systems
